I’ve used Emacs for the last 25 years or so. Over half my life!
There are lots of other great editors, I try them now and then, but I realized a while back that I’ll probably use Emacs until I die.
I’m ok with that.
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Wrote up a technical design doc on Bridgy Fed’s internals, hopefully useful for anyone who wants to contribute or just see how it works. Feedback is welcome!
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In research, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.
– Richard Hamming, via South Park Commons, The Case for Talent Density in -1 to 0
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Heard a stunning statistic just now: new WDM gear can do 1.6Tbps on a single strand of fiber. Holy crap.
(Decoder, Gary Smith / Nilay Patel, 13:46)
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My one and only superpower as an open source maintainer is the phrase “Sorry for the trouble!”
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Discussed a fascinating idea for a foundation model tool at lunch today: interactive navigation in embedding space.
Right now, you prompt most generative models with human language. That works, but it’s imprecise and coarse. If you’re generating an image of an outside scene, and you want the sunlight ever so slightly brighter, you could add the phrase “and ever so slightly brighter” to the prompt, and it might work, but it’s clunky, and not great, and clearly doesn’t scale. Maybe good enough for recreational use cases; clearly not professional grade.
What you really want to do is move your target in embedding space directly, without the lossy indirection of going through human language. Ideally, you’d have a dial that mapped directly to sunlight luminance, and you could bump it up just a bit. Similar to temperature for LLMs, but for fine control over direction and distance in high-dimensionality embedding space, as opposed to overall stochasticity.
Imagine a big mixing board at a professional music studio. You generate an initial image as a starting point, and the model analyzes it and gives you the top 100 principal components as vectors in embedding space, each grounded to the closest embedding and human word that describes them. Smiles, spikiness, wood, buttons, height above the ground, crowd density, all sorts of concepts, each with a knob you can dial up or down. They won’t be entirely independent, so cranking up smiles may also move the warmth, happiness, and sociability knobs, which is ok.
It’s a complicated UI! Definitely not as approachable as “just type into the text box.” And typing into a text box has gotten us pretty far! But if we’re stuck with human language as our main interface to generative models, that’s extremely limiting. Professionals won’t tolerate that for long; they need more powerful, fine grained interfaces that give them a high degree of interactive control and ability to iterate. Language prompts may have gotten us here, as they say, but they may not get us there.
AI researchers will note that this has lots of prior art in grounding and interpretability, among other areas. I’m no expert, I’d love to hear any thoughts!
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Enjoyed this early proposal for an alternative to BGP/OSPF from way back in 1964. Even more bottom-up! ASes don’t claim routes or prefixes at all, they just send packets with source IPs and per-hop TTLs, and shortest paths converge backward based on those.
Assuming symmetrical bi-directional links, the postman can infer the “best” paths to transmit mail to any station merely by looking at the cancellation time or the equivalent handover number tag. If the postman sitting in the center of the United States received letters from San Francisco, he would find that letters from San Francisco arriving from channels to the west would come in with later cancellation dates than if such letters had arrived in a roundabout manner from the east. Each letter carries an implicit indication of its length of transmission path. The astute postman can then deduce that the best channel to send a message to San Francisco is probably the link associated with the latest cancellation dates of messages from San Francisco. By observing the cancellation dates for all letters in transit, information is derived to route future traffic. The return address and cancellation date of recent letters is sufficient to determine the best direction in which to send subsequent letters.
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I’m not eating my own dog food
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://snarfed.org/2023-04-15_im-not-eating-my-own-dog-food
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So long, Twitter API, and thanks for all the fish
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://snarfed.org/2023-04-03_so-long-twitter-api-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish
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I’ve been a fan of Stewart Brand‘s Pace Layering for decades now. Really great framework for thinking about how different ecosystems and emergent forces interact. I’ve been thinking about a tech version of it for the better part of a year, and I finally took advantage of the holiday break to bang out a rough draft. Thoughts?
Product includes devices like XBox, TiVo, and PalmPilot; apps like Firefox, MS Office, and Lotus 1-2-3; and services like Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia.
Components include libraries and frameworks: glibc, LLVM, Django, React, Docker, Arduino, etc.
Organizations involve some form of human governance, eg companies like Bell Labs, IBM, Microsoft, and ARM; non-profits like ICANN, the FSF, and the Linux and Apache foundations; and standards bodies like IETF, W3C, ECMA, and OASIS.
Standards are open via standards bodies, proprietary to individual companies, and de facto. Examples include networking protocols like TCP/IP, HTTP, and SMTP; file formats like HTML, JPEG, and WAV; character encodings like ASCII, ISO 8859-1, and Unicode; operating system interfaces like Win32, POSIX, and Cocoa; and hardware languages like Verilog, VHDL, CUDA, FPGAs, etc.
Computer science and electrical engineering are the academic fields that provide the direct foundations for software and hardware, respectively, and math and physics underneath them. Number theory and cryptography, information theory, combinatorics, Boolean logic, digital and analog circuit design, and arguably even materials science processes like EUV lithography all live here.
I’m far from the first to think along these lines. Erik Samsoe on Twitter (with Brand himself), Dmitri Glazkov’s Forces of the pace layering confusion, and Gartner’s Pace-layered Application Strategy. Taking a wider view, the classic 7-layer ISO network model and 4-layer IETF model are a form of pace layering applied to networking protocols.
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everyone’s always donating their body to science when they die. I want to donate my body to art
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ah, that wonderful age-old Christmas tradition, the cardboard boat race
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It’s time for a special holiday Bridgy Fed status update!
Since last time, we’ve been working mostly on getting A New Social off the ground and on Bridgy Fed internals. Specifically, my development focus for a while now has been cost cutting. I fund Bridgy Fed myself right now, which I’m happy to do, but it costs more to run than it should, probably by 2-3x or so.
(We do plan to fundraise for A New Social eventually and fund Bridgy Fed there instead! Including individual donations, among other sources. Stay tuned for more news when we have it.)
In the meantime, I’ve been pushing the optimization boulder uphill, making slow progress. I’m currently struggling with one big issue: getting caching working in ndb, our ORM.
ndb can cache both in memory and in memcache. We configure it to do both, but it doesn’t seem to be using memcache in production, and I’m not even sure it’s caching in memory there either. If you have experience with ndb, Google Cloud Datastore, Memorystore, or related tools, please take a look and let me know if you see anything obviously wrong!
This also means that I haven’t had much time to spend on features, bug fixes, or other user-visible updates. I’m the only developer on Bridgy Fed right now, and I’m only part time. I’d love help! It’s entirely open source, so if you’re interested, check out the open issues, feel free to dive in, and ping me on GitHub if you have any questions!
Having said that, I have done a bit besides cost cutting since last time:
As usual, feel free to ping us with feedback, questions, and bug reports. You can follow the now label on GitHub to see what we’re currently focusing on. See you on the bridge!
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fog over the bay was intense this morning
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Excited to announce that I’m teaming up with Anuj Ahooja on a new non-profit for the open social web, across protocols, with Bridgy Fed as its first main project! Introducing A New Social.
When I posted Possible futures for Bridgy Fed a while back, I was surprised and gratified by the outpouring of support. So many of you really believe in it and want it to survive, grow, and find a stable footing beyond the useful little one-person side project it is today.
Some people stepped up even further and said, “I’m willing to put the work in and actually help build, drive, and even lead this.” Anuj is one of those people. He’s a renaissance man who’s worked on the fediverse and open social web for many years at sub.club, Flipboard, and more. He’s written at length about the potential he sees in the open social web, across all sorts of networks – “people, not platforms!” – and how we have an opportunity now that we haven’t had in a long time.
And there are so many more of you, across the space, who’ve joined and committed to supporting us! We’re truly humbled and grateful. We’re still only at the very beginning, we have a lot of work to do, but we’re excited to get started. Wish us luck, and please reach out if you want to get involved!
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software
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://snarfed.org/software
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Congratulations to the Threads team on launching fediverse follows! Big step for the open social web.
Among other things, this means that you can now bridge your Threads account into Bluesky by following @bsky.brid.gy, and your Bluesky account into Threads by following @ap.brid.gy. Exciting!
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